Friday Dispatch: In the Flow or Out of Sync
Featuring physics... and muppets
Friday greetings,
Before you read on, please take a minute to watch this video:
What was that like for you to watch?
For me this week, it was riveting. Mesmerizing. Like life itself – swinging and spinning from order to chaos to the most elegant patterns to chaos to order again. Honestly, I found it so moving, I nearly wept.
At any given moment, we might relate most to one or another phase of this 60-minute microcosm of the nature of existence. If you’re in a place of feeling connected with the flow of life, savor it. If everything feels fakakta, that, too, is accounted for. In fact, it’s to be expected.
One of the most profound things I’ve been learning about the creative process this year (which is to say life, because what is life if not a creative process?) is that the tension between things is not a problem, but a powerful opportunity to practice.
I recently learned about a theory of the world where people fall into two categories: chaos muppets and order muppets. Yes, muppets, as in the Muppet Show. For example, Animal is a chaos muppet, whereas Bert, of Bert and Ernie fame, is an order muppet.
As soon as I learned of this worldview, I knew which kind of muppet I am. (Can you guess?)
Just as I’m an ambivert when it comes to introversion and extroversion, I am a hybrid muppet.
In some ways, I am chaotic – I am a fast mover and thinker, and my creativity and ways of connecting are often borne of intuition, impulse, experimentation, and spontaneity. I can be impatient with too many rules or requirements, especially if they strike me as arbitrary.
In other ways, I am all order. I get stressed out by messes, for example – I love an empty kitchen sink, a solid plan, the ground beneath my feet, and the containers that rituals and traditions offer us.
There are times when being a chaos muppet is not so handy. Like preparing taxes, for example. And there are times when being an order muppet is stifling, such as when I’m sitting in front of a piece of watercolor paper feeling afraid to make a mark. I feel like someone should write a dissertation about this.
“Freedom within structure” is one of my favorite concepts.
What is my point here? Hmmmm. I think what I’m exploring is that neither muppet is better or worse than the other. Like the short video above, moments of chaos and moments of order are simply both components of life happening.
We make things and we unmake things. We discover things and we lose the plot, lose the keys, and sometimes we even lose our minds. We get glimpses of something exquisite, even divine, when we hear a baby laughing or see a murmuration of starlings carving shapes into sky. Our bodies become emblems of the most stunning systems and also the most excruciating breakdowns. Growth and decay, regulation and disregulation, harmony and dissonance. It’s all part of it.
Wherever you find yourself today – in the flow or out of sync – please remember that everything is part of everything else.
No matter how separate you feel, no matter how permanent things seem, it’s all moving, changing, ever-becoming.
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
p.s. what kind of muppet are you? Do tell.
I always identified with Oscar the Grouch, which means (maybe?) I am an order muppet disguised as a chaos Muppet? (It really means I have anxiety!)
yes.